


Given Names

by Anonymous



Category: Mr. Lucky (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Post-Canon, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29197275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: I guess there were consequences to the way we worked. We never even knew each other's names.
Relationships: Andamo/Lucky/Maggie Shank-Rutherford
Collections: Anonymous





	Given Names

We never actually told each other our names. He knew me by the moniker I adopted and I knew him only by what the other fellows called him. After a while it was nearly a point of pride for me--if I thought somebody was likely to use his first name I excused myself, and I had mail delivered directly to him, even though our desks sat not six feet apart.

I don't know if he took the same pleasure in it; he simply never asked. If I said my name was Mr. Lucky, even on days when it seemed completely laughable, he accepted it. He accepted just about anything. They don't make them like him anymore.

For the longest time I left his desk where it was and worked around it like he was only off stretching his legs, but that was even worse. I still didn't get rid of it until Maggie told me she'd found a home for it. Give someone else the chance to enjoy it, she said, and of course she was right. Didn't stop me from crying when it was gone. She cried as well. That was alright, she said. Sometimes you just needed a good cry.

They don't make them like her anymore, either. Maybe that's why he thought I was so lucky--somehow I ended up with both of them.

I never realized he had a family, besides Maggie and me, I mean. A sister, a brother-in-law, not one but three nieces, all of them nice as can be and so fond of him. The sister followed my lead, too, even if it was awkward that she once shared his name. I asked if she was Andamo's relation and she said yes, his sister.

"He told us all about you," she said. I told her I hoped it was all good things, and she smiled. "Only the best. The way he talked you were the second coming."

She had to be exaggerating, of course, but I wanted to cry all over again when I heard that. She told me all these stories about them growing up together--he was eight years older than she was and apparently really took to the whole sibling thing. I could just about picture him as this scrappy little kid ready to fight anybody who looked at her wrong.

"I'll bet he was a funny looking kid," Maggie said. "He was a funny looking adult."

I turned about salmon-pink but his sister laughed. "All children are 'funny-looking,' Miss Shank..."

"Maggie," she told her. "Please, just Maggie."

She was so polite, his sister, not even a little like him. She didn't tell me what happened because I didn't want to know. She told Maggie, and Maggie relayed it to me.

"It was fast," she said when we were back at the Fortuna II. "Over and done in a few minutes."

"What happened?" I wanted to ask her. If I knew for sure I wouldn't picture the worst. I kept imagining an accident, his body sprawled on the pavement in a pool of blood, or crushed against the side of a building, or lying in an alley with his throat slit, or worse, in a corner somewhere with a knife and a long ugly slice running up his arm. But I didn't want to know, not really. He wouldn't have killed himself, I was sure of it, but if I was wrong...

I cried. Maggie cried. He probably would have laughed at us.

I don't know what I'd do without Maggie. There's all sorts of tiny things involved in this place that I would never think of. Who would imagine that the napkins get washed separate from the drapes, or that the rug in the front hall have to be replaced every six weeks, or that you should never start the night on a half tank of petrol? It's not that any of those things are difficult, necessarily, but it turns out he's done so much of the work behind the scenes that I just don't have a clue. But Maggie's a smart one. She catches on quick and she does his jobs well. It's just strange that it's not him.

The regulars ask about him and I never know what to say. If I tell them he's gone they'll sometimes ask how, and seeing as I don't know how it makes everything awkward. If I say he's just no longer part of the business they'll assume we had some kind of falling out and I banished him or he stormed out or something. I've been telling people that he wanted to spend some time with his sister. Eventually they'll start to think he's been gone too long, and I'll have to explain it or come up with a better story or run away very fast, but for right now no one questions it.

It's almost more heartbreaking to see the ones who don't seem to notice he's gone. They don't ask, don't mention, don't care, I guess. He was just a face in the background, easily replaceable. I wonder if they'd feel the same if it was me who was gone, or Maggie. I don't want to believe so, but I wouldn't have wanted to believe they could forget him, either.

Losing him seems like an end to a long streak of luck, but I've seen enough to know that I'm still Mr. Lucky. I work a job that keeps me busy during long lonely nights, I have Maggie to help and to help me in return, and hey, the Fortuna II is still floating, which is more than I can say about Fortuna I.

That, and I did get to spend more than half my life with this remarkable man.

I'm so tired of crying. I want to crawl into bed and stay there for a year, and I'd probably do it too if I weren't so afraid of being alone with my thoughts. I work all night to keep myself from thinking, and then in the morning when it's time to sleep and the thoughts are there I just can't handle it. I haven't slept, really slept, since it happened.

I finally broke one night in the kitchen and one of the servers brought Maggie in and she sat right there on the pantry floor beside me and put her arms around me while I cried myself silly.

"How did it happen?" I asked her. I was still picturing some counter-revolutionary blowing his brains out or him bleeding to death in an abandoned house. Every scenario I came up with got darker and darker.

"Not here," Maggie told me. She led me back to my bunk and waited for me to calm down before she told me the truth. Tears already rolling down her face, she told me, "His heart just gave out, Lucky. He was fine one minute and then sick the next and then he was gone."

His heart did what? That didn't make sense. People's hearts don't just stop for no reason. What was he doing? What was being done to him?

"Sofia said he was playing with the girls. They were chasing him around the yard and he started to feel sick so he told them he needed a break. She said she saw him coming toward the house and when he got to the door he just collapsed. She thinks he was dead before he hit the ground."

Dead. He was dead. He was dead and we were still here.

"He never told you?" Maggie asked. "About his heart?"

He never said a damn word to me about his heart.

"He told me a few years back. You remember, right after Christmas when he was so sick? I asked him what I could do to help and he told me he just had a weak heart and there wasn't anything to be done about it."

He told her that? All of a sudden it occurred to me that the two of them had their own relationship, separate from me. I always thought of our relationship like a line, running from him to me and then me to Maggie, but somewhere along the way the line turned into a circle, just him, me, and Maggie, spinning endlessly like a roulette wheel that would never stop.

"Sofia's right, you know," she told me. "He thought the world of you."

I know he did, and that's the hell of it.

"Why didn't he tell me?" I asked her. "Did he not trust me?"

"I don't know, Lucky. Maybe he was afraid you'd worry. Maybe he only told me because I was the nearest person at the moment he needed to tell somebody. It's not a fault in you. He loved you exactly the way you are."

He must have been afraid in those last few minutes. Maybe he realized what was coming or maybe not, but he clearly knew something was wrong and he didn't want the girls to see it. Maybe he thought Sofia could help him, or maybe he wanted to be near her when it happened.

Why didn't he ever say something? Why didn't he ever _do_ something? Even if there was nothing that could have been done it would have made me feel less useless to try.

Now I'm second-guessing every second of the way. Every scrape we were ever in, every minute he seemed a little too pale, every second I felt or heard his heart beating, keeps replaying in my mind. I hate this. That bastard tricked me all these years. He shoulda told me so I could have put my ear to his chest and realized just how lucky I really was.

God, I miss him.

I wrote his sister a letter to thank her for handling it all--there was no way in hell I could have done it--and letting her know I was wiring some money for the services. I cried writing the damn thing and I thought, what the hell, I'd already revised how I saw him once, why not dive in the deep end?

For the first time in decades I signed my Christian name. A show of faith, I guess.

She wrote back to say that it was far more money than the services required--I knew that when I sent it; that was why I sent it--and that she would wire some back. Well, she could wire all she wanted but I was just gonna send it back and if we were playing hot potato for the next decade so be it. She said she had been to the grave and it was just fine and if I wasn't ready yet maybe I'd like to come back someday and see the wayaca tree they'd planted the day of the funeral. It wasn't ready to bloom but it was still lovely. And then she wrote this:

"It is funny about the name. My brother never cared for his given name but it is Luis. Luis Salomon Andamo."

It is funny, I wrote back, and it was. It was funny and sad and maybe someday Maggie will think so too. I'm just not ready yet.

"Thank you for the information," I wrote back. "If there is anything I can do for you or your family don't hesitate to let me know. Family of his is family of mine."

I started to sign it "Lucky," like I always do, but she knew now, didn't she, and if it really was funny then I didn't have much of an excuse. So I crossed it out and just signed it "Louis."


End file.
